Nora Heysen's life (1911-2003) and art were intimately bound
up with modernism. Initially this occurred through her upbringing in the
Heysen household, where current directions in art were the staple of
daily conversation and correspondence among family, friends and wider
art circles. The most productive years of her career from the early
1930s to the mid 1960s coincide with a rich phase in the Australian
inflection of modernism, while time overseas exposed her to
international trends. She was spectacularly successful in breaking the
glass ceiling by winning the Archibald Prize in 1939, the Melrose Prize
in 1933 and again in 1941, and in being appointed an official war
artist, along with Stella Bowen and Sybil Craig. (1) Yet Nora Heysen is
not ranked as a leading Australian modernist. Moreover, she was never
secure about her position in the Australian art world, and felt
overshadowed by her father Hans Heysen (1877-1968). In one letter home
in 1937, she described how in London she accepted an invitation to a
sherry party, but 'on arriving I was introduced all round in a loud
voice as the daughter of the famous Australian painter Hans Heysen--I
felt like an exhibit.' (2) She was also a perpetual conduit for
messages to her father, and it was only late in life she felt she had
arrived as an artist in her own right.

The complexity of this career profile has, on the one hand, a
gendered explanation which I will explore in this paper, but it also
relates to agency and strategic positioning which I will similarly
probe. This analysis draws on more recent understandings and expanded
ideas of modernism which extend beyond formalist categories to embrace
the intersections between gender, modernity and the city. (3)

Nora corresponded with her father on a regular basis and those
letters provide an insight into how Hans Heysen oversaw his
daughter's art education in the London years, and then how Nora
negotiated her own modern style and professional career. He established
a teaching dialogue, asking her to describe in detail what she was
working on, and to send photographs of work completed so that he could
offer his views and suggest improvements. This advice was expected and
usually welcome.

These letters were written for private readers, although the
notion of 'private' is elastic here because Nora's
letters were read out to all assembled family, and given to family
friends to be read. In turn, Nora, as an art school student in London,
read and re-read her father's letters, which she called
'working letters' because they were mostly all about art. For
the last few decades of her life, she knew that the letters he received
from her were housed in the National Library, and not long before she
died she agreed that her own letters would be placed there, too. So
within her own lifetime, she was aware her letters would be read by a
wider audience than her family and friends. In drawing on these letters
of father and daughter, this paper will consider Nora's
relationship with modernism as an art school student, her views on
modern art, and her positioning as modernist along a spectrum of
modernism.

For most of Nora's most productive years, her father was a
giant in the Australian art world, working up to the time of his death
in 1968. During his lifetime, he won the Wynne Prize for landscape
painting nine times, and his art was acquired by all state collections.
He was appointed an OBE (Officer of the British Empire) in 1945 and was
Knighted in 1959, both honours for services to art. When Queen Elizabeth
II visited in 1954, Hans, standing next to one of his signature gum tree
paintings, was presented to her as an iconic 'Australian'
artist. Yet his views on modern art were ambivalent, if not reactionary,
even though his own Flinders Ranges landscapes such as The Land at
Oratunga (1932), are modern in how he approaches landscape as a skeletal
bony form, devoid of growth. His friends ranged from known conservatives
like artist Lionel Lindsay, to progressives such as publisher Sydney Ure
Smith and gallery director Louis McCubbin. Many, like him, were trustees
of the state galleries, so they formed a powerful network. He supported,
and was a member of, the short-lived, Menzies-driven Australian Academy
of Art. This is the background that frames Nora Heysen, and it defines
one side of the cultural world in which she moved. Another side of her
is more bohemian: she moved to Sydney in 1938 and mixed in Kings Cross
art circles. While a war artist, she formed a relationship with an
already-married Robert Black, with whom she lived until his divorce came
through in 1953, when they married.

Modern style

When Nora moved to London in mid 1934, she was immediately
confronted with British modernism. While working in Australia, she had
not been entirely isolated from modern British artists like Stanley
Spencer, because her father subscribed to London newspapers which
featured his work, along with that of Augustus John and other eminent
moderns. Also within the Heysen circle there were serious art
collectors, so Nora herself had been brought up amid talk of
contemporary British art. Nevertheless, her total immersion in a
cosmopolitan city and its art scene transformed her work. (4) She
communicated that change in her regular letters home to her parents
(but, really, her father) and he as her first teacher advised her
throughout.

The first visual statement of this transformation comes in a Self
portrait, 1934. It was painted a few months after her family left
England, having sailed with her to London to install her into the
Central School of Art, and lodgings at Duke Street, Kensington. It is
the only known self portrait where she shows herself from a wholly
frontal view, and without any clues to her profession such as painting
easels and brushes. (5) It is modern and visually arresting. She
presents herself as a young woman (she was then 23 years of age) alone
and facing the world head-on. It feels like a statement made at the
beginning of a journey: she is unsure what lies ahead, but knows she
must be self reliant and prove herself.

The brown jacket she is wearing underscores her aloneness; it
seems to sit on her shoulders as if to suggest she is dressed in one of
her few possessions, ready to confront the world. This is very different
from the way she showed herself prior to leaving for London in another
Self portrait, 1932, painted in Hahndorf. In this one she presents
herself side-on in her studio, in a Vermeer-like interior complete with
a Vermeer reproduction behind her, while the rich, brown velvety jacket
suggests security and a quiet confidence in her chosen career path.

What happened to Nora Heysen in 1934 that prompted such a
startling artistic response? She was developing a successful career in
Adelaide but, like many artists and her own father some years earlier,
she deliberately sought experience and tuition in a cultural centre. Her
father went to Paris, she to London. (6) This well-trodden path
involving travel and leaving behind one's local origins underpins
the modernist experience of many in the literary and visual arts. As
Caren Kaplan comments, 'through recent modernity at the very least,
the idea of escape from the nation-state into the cosmopolitan polyglot
city, underscores most ideologies of modernism.' (7) Indeed, when
Hans Heysen returned home from London in late 1934, he wrote to Nora,
'Adelaide seems very tiny, strangely small, and provincial.'
(8)

However, cosmopolitanism is more than immersion in a metropolitan
culture; it requires 'an outlook of ... cultural openness.'
(9) This attitude of complete receptivity to new ways lies at the heart
of the struggle with modernism that Nora Heysen underwent while overseas
and, as I will establish in this paper, it explains why she is
positioned as she is. She learnt she had old ways to throw off, and she
rapidly took advantage of London's art scene. She was a voracious
theatre attendee and soaked up musical concerts, drama performances and
films, commenting in one letter home that she had just seen her first
talking picture. In art circles, she had moved away from comfortable and
familiar environs, and as Iwona Blazwick comments, 'it is a paradox
of the metropolis that its scale and heterogeneity can generate an
experience both of unbearable invisibility and liberating anonymity; of
alienating disconnectedness, indeed impotence; and of the possibility of
unbounded creativity.' (10)

Nora was in this transitional space, open to new ways, but still
in the process of finding herself. This is apparent from her reply to
one of her brothers, who wrote asking about a body of work he thought
was being assembled for an exhibition, to which she replied:
'I've never been further from the idea of an exhibition. My
past life seems like a dream.' (11) Her father, while affirming
that London was opening up a new world for her, reminded her that she
was seeing this world 'with Ambleside [that is Hahndorf] as a
background.' (12) This observation was doubtless meant with a
kindly intent of providing reassurance from home, but it also carried
with it the suggestion that new ideas were, in a sense,
'measured' against those at home.

Initially Nora was very lonely, and living by herself was quite
an adjustment after life in a large, bustling family home. She called it
that 'alone feeling', but more than loneliness pervades her
modern Self portrait. Her teacher at the Central School, Bernard
Meninsky (1891-1950)--who exhibited with the progressive New English Art
Club and mixed with respected modern artists including Jacob Epstein,
Lucien Freud and the Bloomsbury group--said that she had been taught
incorrectly. (13) This struck at the core of her confidence, and caused
her to question her father's tutelage and her Adelaide art school
teaching, and she described this incident as 'the worst most
damning criticism I've ever had.' (14) She reported home that
Meninsky said that her 'drawing was lifeless, dull, superficial and
the technique was like sandpaper. He couldn't have said anything
more disheartening and my conceit went a mighty crash.' (15)

The harsh criticism was due to the fact that each approached
drawing from a different perspective. Meninsky, she said, 'draws
with a heavy line and square modelling, handling the pencil like a pen,
whereas I draw with a single line and use shading to emphasise certain
forms.' (16) Nora was unsure whether to follow her own instincts or
take on board his advice. Her dilemma was, as she wrote home, 'he
draws very well and I admire the solidity and movement he gets, but I
don't want to draw like him.' In one letter she wrote,
'ever since then I have been very subdued and discouraged, but I
suppose there's nothing for it but to keep on.' (17) She did
adopt some of his suggestions, because the square modelling and
sculptural solidity which were his trademark styles carried over into
her 1934 Self portrait. Two weeks later, she had come to terms with his
comments, and admitted: 'I think I will gain from his criticism, it
hurts no-one to be pulled to pieces and thoroughly faulted.' Once
Hans Heysen was back in Adelaide, he wrote reassuringly:
'don't get too disheartened by Meninsky's criticism of
your drawing. I think the main object is to insist on the pupil
searching for movement and life.' (18)

By early December, Nora was regaining her sense of self and,
having decided she didn't particularly like her teacher's
manner of drawing, wrote home, 'I'm not so dampened as I might
be.' (19) However, those first few months of exposure to life in
the metropolitan centre, and being receptive to what was around her,
took some adjustment. Her father sensed this and wrote in February 1935,
'confidence is essential.' (20)

Her father was keenly interested in how his daughter was
developing and, in a letter written on 22 March 1935, said: 'I
often itch for a glimpse of your studio.' Quite possibly fearing
she was experimenting too, he much advised her: 'at your present
stage of development, colour after all is not of such importance as form
and structure-never relinquish your hold on your search for
structure.' (21) Even though Nora was searching for a modern style,
her father's advice, that 'the germ of what you will
eventually do in flower painting is already in your earlier
studies,' (22) implies that he did not expect her to engage in a
radical change in style. He saw her time in London as one of developing
the qualities of 'tone, movement and atmosphere,' which had
earlier eluded her. (23)

Nora found the geographical distance of London an advantage,
though, in determining her own friends, knowing her parents might not
approve. She had invited her Adelaide friend Evie, who was coming to
London, to share her flat with her, and she arrived just before
Christmas in 1934. It was a sensible move. Nora was lonely and together
they could share costs. Her parents, however, did not see it that way,
and her mother who was particularly concerned about this friendship,
accused her of 'cupidity.' Class may have been an issue, and
Nora was not permitted to ask Evie up to 'The Cedars', but it
was more their fear of a close relationship with another woman which
underpinned their reaction. Nora persevered and stuck by Evie despite
her parents' views, and she features in several portraits done in
the London years such as the very dreamy and intimate Portrait of
Everton (Evie), 1936.

In addition to painting portraits, Nora had a passion for flower
painting. This was inherited from her father, and the large garden of
the family home, 'The Cedars', in the Adelaide Hills, where
flowers were in plentiful supply. While flower painting conjures up
images of art antithetical to modern art, it was a highly respectable
modern subject which a number of British artists in the 1930s were
approaching, including Jacob Epstein and Matthew Smith. Stanley
Spencer's Sunflower, 1938, is typical of this new approach. (24) He
presents flowers not as an elegantly arranged bunch as did Hans Heysen
but, in borrowing from photography and in its cropped modern style,
zooms in on a sunflower as a loaded erotic subject. Epstein painted his
expressionist Lilies and Dahlias, both in 1936, in a similar way. Nora
saw what the modern men were doing with flowers because their work was
exhibited at Tooths' in Bond Street, which she regularly visited,
yet she wrestled with painting flowers along different lines. The
problem was that her model for flower painting was in part the more
conventional pre-modern French artist Henri Fantin-Latour (1863-1904),
whose work she saw in London's National Gallery. She wrote back
enthusiastically to her father, also an accomplished realist flower
painter, as she did in August 1935, about how she felt her painting did
not measure up to Fantin:

Clearly Fantin represented the gold standard for Hans Heysen too,
and in his letter of reply he commented that Fantin was the most perfect
painter of flowers. (26)

Nora saw her time in London as a process of working out a modern
painting style, without abandoning her admiration for Fantin, and in
moving away from her former Adelaide approach of putting in as many
flowers as she could manage into a composition. She wrote:

While she was working on developing these painterly qualities,
the second jolt to developing an individual style came not from a modern
artist like Meninsky, but from the conservative quarter: from her
father's friend James Bateman, a Royal Academician. He criticised
her recent painting, but Nora was able to defend herself as her letter
home on 19 May 1936 shows:

Bateman, being a loyal friend of Hans Heysen, then wrote to him
about how Nora was losing her way. Hans duly wrote to his daughter and,
in his usual kindly fashion, said he understood it was quite natural to
experiment, but that she would 'probably find on reflection that
there is more than a grain of truth in what he says ... for
Bateman's insistence on tone or tonal values is I feel very
sound--particularly for a young painter--for tone is the substance and
colour decorates it.' Her father added he had 'complete
confidence in your stability and sanity of outlook.' (29)

Nora was being gently led back, first by a Royal Academician and
then by her father, and there was little chance she would experiment
with modern art too much, especially when the coded phrase 'sanity
of outlook' was used. Sanity implied staying clear of ultra-modern
ways, and was much used by Hans Heysen in letters to Norman and Lionel
Lindsay to deplore trends in modern art.

However, Nora was already positioning herself as modern, and by
September 1935 this extended to her choice of frames. She wrote home:
'I chose a very modern frame for the cornflowers of unpolished oak.
It is an excellent frame for a modern work, simple and well made and
excellent for a modern home ... I'll wonder what you think of it.
Probably think I'm going modern. I want things simple.' (30)
She was also experimenting with light and less clutter in her flower
pieces, and thought them a big improvement on what she was painting
before coming to London. She wrote:

Deep in experimentation with light, one month later, Nora met
Orovida Pissarro. This proved to be another significant event along the
path of modern style. Orovida, the daughter and grand-daughter
respectively of French impressionist painters Lucien Pissarro and
Camille Pissarro, felt burdened by her distinguished lineage and, in her
search for self, abandoned the family name and their impressionist style
and painted by her own given name. As Kristen Erickson observed, this
very 'struggle for individuality and originality became central to
Orovida's art and life.' (32)

This meeting was not an accident. It was contrived by Hans Heysen
and came about because Nora, who had seen the artist's painting
Native Motherhood with Magnolia on show in a London gallery, wrote to
her father about it. This led to Hans Heysen writing to Orovida
enquiring about purchasing the work, which he duly did. As Hans Heysen
wrote to his daughter, 'a letter came this morning from Miss
Pissarro ... she has asked you to tea with her. I am eagerly awaiting
the results of the meeting ... somehow I have always felt she was an
interesting person as well as a painter.' (33)

Of that meeting in October 1935, Nora wrote home, 'she
showed me all her work, gave me coffee and discussed art--all terribly
interesting to me.' Nora then rapidly returned the invitation by
inviting Orovida to her studio to see her work. The advice, as with that
from Meninsky, came as a shock:

Nora accepted the advice and went out and purchased new colours
of 'white, cadmium, red and pale-ultramarine, vert compose, cobalt
and crimson', and added in her letter to her father, 'it is
amazing the depth and richness of colour that can be got without using
brown or black.' (35) Those latter dark colours to which Nora
refers, and of which Orovida disapproved, were the ones her father had
taught her to use. Hans, however, supported his daughter's
experimentation, writing: 'it is far better and educational to get
a criticism from an out-spoken person--even if only partly right, than
the flattering remarks of those who want to please.' His qualified
support suggested that the new colours might be too modern. (36) By
February 1936, Nora reported home that Miss Pissarro thought her work
had improved, had 'more feeling in it, and was less slick and
clever.' (37)

Nora, meanwhile, was continuing to develop a coded language in
her self portraits that defined her as a modern artist and modern woman.
She was guarded about her experimentation and in her letters rarely
described what she conveyed of herself, other than to say she was a
'handy and inexpensive model to experiment on.' She was happy,
however, to describe their painterly qualities, such as colour and
composition, as her father had requested. (38) To mark her twenty-fifth
birthday and her transition to 'womanhood', which she said had
been hastened by 'living here by myself in London and making my own
decisions,' Nora painted a Self portrait, 1936, of herself as an
artist. She wrote home: 'I am doing myself in a blue smock against
the wall and a part of my pink roses--the colour scheme is beautiful and
I hope to make something good out of it.' (39) Her use of paint is
looser, with broken areas of colour in her face and in the background.
She explained she had taken Miss Pissarro's advice in this painting
and used a higher key with no black or brown. Her palette, tipped
forward for the viewer to inspect, shows her new colours on display: the
subtext is that she has abandoned her early training at home. By
February of that year, it is Miss Pissarro's advice that is valued
rather than her father's, and Nora reported home that her new
mentor, who could see improvement in her work, was 'partly
condemning, partly encouraging,' and that 'she likes the self
portrait, thinks it is far the best bit of painting I have ever
done.' (40)

Another theme embedded in contesting modernism and running
through the letters from father to daughter relates to the Hans Heysen
ethic of the need to escape from the unhealthy city air to the clean
country atmosphere, and the inspiration to be gained by working in
'honest' country environs: a chord Nora related to due to her
own upbringing in rural Hahndorf. Every so often Nora and Evie would
escape on a hiking trip to the English countryside, and her father
always applauded such ventures. He wrote: 'I liked to hear in your
last letter that you were out and away from London, into the fresh air!
It is quite essential to do this often if you want to keep fit ... both
mind and body must be aired up, so to speak, in fresh
surroundings.' (41)

In the summer of 1936, Evie and Nora took a very basic
'shack', minus running water, and worked in simple environs
for six weeks. While this rural impulse is one familiar to many
modernists, Nora's motives were not those, but rather to tap the
'truth' of the countryside, and show how her negotiation of
modernism was vacillating between what she was working out in the city,
and what her father had taught her. As she wrote home, 'this
primitive life has its little drawbacks, but for the most part it is
grand to be under the sky again overlooking the distant hills and fields
of waving grass.' (42) This ambivalence about the city versus the
country runs though her London years, and affected her receptivity to
the cosmopolitan ethos; she wrote home close to end of the venture:
'though cities have much to offer, my heart will always be in the
country.' (43) This comment affirmed the values her father upheld,
and points to her being divided over domestic imagery or the landscape,
and echoes what she said a year earlier: 'I want to paint people,
homely interiors, skies and trees and water and all that is living and
vibrating around me.' (44)

By 1937, Nora once again appreciated the advantages of living and
working in a cosmopolitan city in terms of 'the education and
stimulation,' and announced in her letter home in January that she
would not return to Australia until she could prove herself and find
herself in London: 'I want to work out my life here ... I want to
absorb as much as possible [and] to experiment to learn.' (45) She
also wanted to exhibit in London. But five months later she had no money
left, and decided to head back home. (46) She had worked at her painting
constantly, moving from Central School to the Byam Shaw School under
Ernest Jackson for more tuition in drawing, and she even employed models
herself to draw from at home. Her last London self portrait Down and Out
in London, 1937 (front cover), alludes to her impoverished state, and
shows her in modest domestic environs perched on the kitchen bench, the
stove close by and laundry hanging behind her. The luscious greens of
her clothing and the calm, relaxed pose imply that she has found her
painting style; her hand resting on her palette points to the modern
colours she has employed in her painting, replete with areas of broken
colour.

Modern art

Living and working in a cosmopolitan city, and in the
countryside, altered Nora's art and she developed a modern style.
This is one aspect of modernism. Another, intrinsic to cosmopolitanism,
is openness to all forms of modern art. The letters between father and
daughter, however, show a mixed acceptance of new trends. Each week Nora
visited London exhibitions and saw the work of most major British and
French modern artists. Her father back in Adelaide subscribed to the
Illustrated London News, and often the work she would describe was
reproduced in the newspaper, which he would then comment on, so it was
not uncommon for a dialogue to run through the letters about particular
artists and their paintings. For instance, she described a painting,
Cookham Lock, 1935, that McGregor had purchased for the Art Gallery of
New South Wales, and which she saw at Tooths' Gallery, as 'a
clever bit of painting ... I think Spencer is the most original painter
working here.' (47) While Stanley Spencer's modern work was
praised, others were not. Dod Proctor was an up-and-coming artist whose
paintings such as In a strange land, 1919, employed fauve colours but
Nora wrote home, 'her work I hated it--it was pale purple and green
and insipid and every picture whether flower or nude or landscape was
the same sickly colour scheme'; to which Hans replied: 'Quite
agree with you regarding Dod Proctor's productions and can't
understand where she gained her reputation. I distinctly dislike her
calm sense, from the little I have seen of her work.' (48)

Flower paintings too were judged by father and daughter on a more
pre-modern model offered by the Fantins at the National Gallery, even
though Nora herself was trying to forge a modern style that built on
Fantin's approach. On seeing an exhibition of modern flower
painting by Vanessa Bell, Augustus John and others, Nora wrote home:
'they made me feel sick, they were so crude and badly arranged and
badly painted and messy in all ways. I have come to the conclusion that
no-one can paint flowers here.' (49)

Modern sculpture too was viewed through a lens of a safe version
of modernism. When Epstein was showing his controversial, oversized
marble carving Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) in 1935 at Leicester
Galleries, Nora sided with the establishment view rather than the
avant-garde, and wrote home 'the thing was ludicrous and hideous
and no-one could take it seriously for a moment.' (50) Hans
reinforced his daughter's views, writing back of Epstein that
'it seems impossible that a man of his genius will commit himself
to such lumpy atrocities,' and that 'the essence of the stone
mason is to give monumental beauty of form and just proportions.'
(51)

Nora was developing a modern style in her painting, but on a
scale of modernism, she did not position herself as ultra-modern;
whereas she considered Roy de Maistre, another Australian then in London
who had cubist leanings, a 'rank modern.' (52) By April 1937,
her perspective had broadened and she was more tolerant of abstraction.
She wrote home about her reaction to a Picasso exhibition she saw as
being unable to 'take the work seriously,' but she recognised
that others did, commenting 'another man can come along with a
intelligence and knowledge and find expression and meaning there which
he finds satisfying and interesting. What strangely conflicting views
there are about.' (53)

Even though Nora had developed a modern style, the more
fundamental issue of embracing modern art across all its manifestations
still eluded her. Her father's preference for impressionist and
post-impressionist work had not made that possible, and maybe she felt
such loyalty to his agenda of portraying the sunshine and vitality of
the bush that she not could take this step.

Strategic positioning

Nora Heysen seemed set to have a stellar career; she had
excellent mentoring from her father about how to handle dealers, what
price to put on a painting and where to exhibit.

Her friend Orovida Pissarro, who served on the executive of the
Women's International Art Club (WIAC), invited her to join that
group, but Nora didn't take up the offer. (54) She said she
didn't have work ready to submit, and would join later. (55) She
seems not to have followed through, and appears to have been ambivalent
about showing with them. (56) It would have given Nora exposure to an
international audience, but she may not have been attracted to a
woman-only venue, even though many who showed with the WIAC exhibited
with non-women's groups as well. (57)

Nora returned home to 'The Cedars' in Hahndorf in 1937
a very different artist. Her father found her work too modern, and her
parents disapproved of her friendship with Evie who came back with her.
They relocated to Sydney in 1938, and Nora established a professional
practice painting flowers and portrait commissions. She chose to show
with the progressive Society of Artists run by her father's good
friend Sydney Ure Smith, and mixed with artists in that circle like
William Dobell, whom she knew in London, and Adrian Feint. Before long
she was a regular Sunday lunch guest of James McGregor, her
father's friend.

Art circles were so small that she was not able to distance
herself very far from her father. When she won the Archibald Prize for
her stunning portrait of Madame Elink Schuurman, 1938, her father's
friends who were the trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales were
some of the judges. Then when she decided she would like to be appointed
a war artist, she approached James McGregor and Sydney Urc Smith, who
were well connected, and Louis McCubbin, who was on the appointments
committee. (58) Her father's influential friends were close by,
watching over her and, at times, assisting her. This is not to imply she
did not win the Archibald Prize based on merit, or that she was not
assertive (she had to be during her time as a war artist), but her
father's network doubtless helped.

Her career choice to paint portraits and flowers, the latter in
her negotiated modern style, kept her within a modernist ambit, the
latter reflecting her focus on domestic space. Her White cacti, c. 1941
(Back cover), is one such work approached in a modern, somewhat
asymmetrical and loose manner, but her flower pieces were not evenly
modern. In others, like her Spring flowers, c.1956, she positioned
herself on the fringes of, if not outside, modernism. She was aware of
this, writing in 1951, 'I can't help myself painting
flowers,' an admission that it was not a strategic career choice,
because that genre, while well suited to modern style as in the work of
Margaret Preston, could also be portrayed outside a modern framework.
Her father's advice that she would never regret painting flowers
for a living, and his reinforcement of Fantin as model, had set her on
this quasi-modern trajectory.

Her portraits, however, remained modern in style, and because her
father did not paint in that genre, but specialised in landscapes and
was best known for his paintings of gum trees, they stood outside his
influence. Her studies of mothers are some of her most enduring.
Dedication, 1941, is one of this series which strips the saccharine glow
off motherhood. Her portrayals of women in the armed services completed
as a war artist have now assumed iconic status about women's
contribution in wartime, and include the powerfully built Transport
driver, Aircraftswoman Florence Miles, 1945, wielding the steering wheel
of a heavy truck with ease. The rise of abstraction, though, in the
1950s and 1960s saw the genre of portraiture fall out of favour, and
artists like Nora Heysen were temporarily bypassed.

Art circles were small in this era, and this Heysen duo, father
and daughter, both showing in the same exhibition, was a familiar sight.
They regularly exhibited together in Society of Artists shows, and at
the Artists by Artists show in 1949. They even held a joint exhibition
in 1963 in Millicent. This lack of separation clearly bothered Nora and,
when interviewed for a profile story in the Age, she commented
'because my father is Hans Heysen, I don't know if I exist in
my own right or not. I suppose I never will know now ... I know that
people who want a Heysen and can't afford one of my father's
pictures sometimes buy one of mine. Perhaps I should be grateful for
that. I'm afraid I'm not.' (59) But issues of agency and
strategic positioning must be considered. Her early acceptance of her
father's limited sphere of modern art, and of his advice always to
turn back to the old masters and to find truth in nature, meant that she
took on a limited version of modern style, especially in her flower
studies. In these, for all the early talk of light and atmosphere, they
either stand on the fringes of modernism or outside it, whereas her
portraits endure as modern. In these, she found a modern style that
stood apart from how her father worked. Being the daughter of a famous
male artist is a daunting challenge as Orovida found, and negotiating a
position of a separate identity is not easy. Some succeed, others do
not. Nora did, but only very late in life when her father's work
had fallen out of fashion.

Notes

(1) Nora Heysen's appointment was approved at the same time
as Stella Bowen's, in February 1943, but Nora took hers up first in
October 1943. Sybil Craig was appointed in March 1945. Catherine Speck,
Painting Ghosts: Australian Women Artists in Wartime, Melbourne:
Craftsman House, 2004: 115-121. The Melrose prize, awarded by the Art
Gallery of South Australia, is for the best work in portraiture.

(3) See Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer (eds.), The
Modern Woman Revisited: Paris between the Wars, New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2003: xxiii-xxi.

(4) Family friends and collectors included James McGregor,
Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Adelaide friends, the
Barr Smiths.

(5) There may be a similar second self portrait; it is referred
to in a letter by Nora to her parents on 13 March 1935. Alternatively,
the artist may have signed and dated this latter and added the date of
1934 when it should have been 1935.

(6) Funds from the sales of Nora's solo exhibition in
Adelaide in 1933 paid for much of her time in London, while the choice
of London for an art school came from her mother Sallie.

(12) Hans Heysen to Nora Heysen, 9 January 1935, folder 32, NLA
MS 10041. During the First World War (1917), the name Hahndorf was
changed to Ambleside, and only reverted to its German name in 1935.

(13) On Meninsky, see Ted Gott, Laurie Benson, Sophie
Matthiesson, Modern Britain 1900-1960, Melbourne: National Gallery of
Victoria, 2007: 144-45; Lisa Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects:
British Art in the Early Twentieth Century, New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000: 149, 159.

(46) Nora Heysen to her parents, 'The money I have is not
going to see me through ... this month I want to book my passage ...
this being how I stand I will be called upon to beg yet again another
loan from Daddy. My debts are mounting fast.--The first thing I will do
when I get home is mount a show and pray that the people will buy,'
4 May 1937, Hans Heysen Papers, MS 5073, NLA, folder 149.

(54) Orovida Pissarro served on the executive of the Women's
International Art Club (WIAC) from 1927 to 1946. WIAC had a
distinguished history, forming in Paris in 1900 as the Paris
International Art Club, and its first British exhibition under its name
was also held in 1900 at the Grafton Galleries. The Club had a
'foreign' membership section, and it held an annual exhibition
until 1976, when it closed due to declining interest and the cost of
hiring space: Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists,
London: Routledge, 1995: 76-7; Women's International Art Club
www.aim25.ac.uk/cats/55/6042.htm

(57) Other Australians and New Zealanders who exhibited with the
WIAC include Frances Hodgkin, Edith Collier, Margaret Preston and Gladys
Reynell.

(58) Nora Heysen, interviewed by the author, 15 September
1989.

(59) 'I don't know if I exist in my own right,'
Age, 6 October 1967.

I have been painting a bunch of flowers mostly gladioli and a few
daisies and some peonies we gathered in the country last week. It
is a gay bunch. I am using various tonings of blue as a
background and a pale yellow cloth on the table. It is almost
finished. Yesterday I went into the National and had a good look
at the Fantin flowers and when I came back I had a great desire
to put my foot through all mine. He can envelop his flowers in
atmosphere so beautifully, and although I try very hard to get
atmosphere and unity into mine, I always seem to fail. (25)

I feel in sympathy with the impressionists who wanted to break
away from all the old traditions and find a new way to express
beauty in nature. I feel I am getting nearer to that. I ultimately
want losing a little of my hitherto rather photographic outlook
and getting more art and feeling into things. I feel freer and
surer of myself and know what I want. (27)

I got a gruelling criticism from Bateman.... He thinks it lacks
tone, that my technique is mechanical and that I'm trying to get
light and vibration in the wrong way. All of which is very
disheartening. But then he is biased against women painters and
likes work that I don't like at all, so I cannot take it all as
gospel truth. (28)

I have been busy painting a gay little bunch of anemones on the
striped cloth. I had a happy time painting it. The light streamed
all through the flowers making them quite ethereal ... I wonder,
would you like the colour scheme and the way I have treated it?
The flowers have more light and atmosphere in them than I have
ever painted before. The background is all light, the cloth light
with the few Polish stripes and the flowers are full of light. (31)

She came in like a bomb dropped out of the blue-She slated me
right and left-She said my paintings were muddy and 50 years
behind time and advised me to change my palette-She admitted
that I could draw and had talent but that is all she allowed me.
She thinks I use too much brown and black and yellow ochre and
keep my colour too low in tone--I who pride myself on my flesh
bright clean colour! You can imagine my surprise on hearing
that--She hates yellow ochre, and I love it and use it in
everything almost-that is where we disagreed. She likes the
interior I have just finished, and thought it the best bit of
work--I agree there. She gave me a list of colours, an entirely
new palette-mostly of cadmiums, excluding ochre, black and
browns. (34)